28 Apr

4 SEO Techniques that you Need to Avoid

For long we have spoken about what techniques you need to apply to optimize your website for the search engines. Today let us look at some SEO techniques which can cause harm instead of benefitting your site and may even lead to your site getting penalized and so need to be avoided.

Low Quality Links: You must seriously avoid adding huge number of links, especially those of low quality sites. Till some time back, websites added large number of links to get higher ranking on the search engines. But now Google doesn’t appreciate this mass addition of links; infact many sites have been penalized by Google for having too many low quality backlinks. Even if you have lesser number of links but they are all of high quality and reputed sites, then it will work in favor of your website.

Keyword manipulation: Gone are the days when keyword stuffing used to be overlooked by the search engines. Google comes down heavily on manipulative techniques and so over stuffing of keywords is not appreciated at all. You need to remember that your text should appeal to the reader first and if it impresses them then it will get noticed by the search engines. So your content should be excellent and informative. If you cram it up with nonsensical sounding sentences just to fit in the keywords, you will earn the wrath of the sentinels of Google. Be watchful about the language of your content and include the keywords just once or twice, unlike earlier where you filled it up with the keywords.

Spammy Guest Blogging: Guest blogging is a great SEO technique to increase brand awareness and popularizing the site. But this method was misused by many as they started posting spammy blog posts just to catch the attention of the search engines. Google realized this and has warned the guest bloggers that they should desist from spammy guest blogging and avoid posting blogs on sites which are in no way relevant to their own sites. You can guest blog but only for high quality sites and not merely for acquiring links or for SEO purposes.

Anchor text manipulation: Manipulators do not leave any opportunity to get through to the top of the search engine rankings. Even the anchor text was not spared. So Google had to strictly scrutinize this aspect and it stressed that all anchor text links should be no-follow links, else the violating sites would be penalized.

With people contemplating on whether SEO is dead, it needs to be stressed here that it is not. Just stick to ethical way of optimizing your site, and avoid using black hat SEO techniques. Remember that slow and steady always gets you to the finishing line and so you need to be patient. Just abide by the rules and regulations introduced in the ever evolving world of SEO and keep adapting to the changes, instead of resorting to manipulative techniques.